Читать книгу The House of Adventure - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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Paul Brent tramped it through Solre le Château and Sars Poteries to Avesnes, winning his food from the English he passed upon the road, for there is no kinder hearted soul on earth than the plain Englishman when his generosity is challenged. Paul played the part of the French civilian deported from a captured village early in the war, and the men in khaki whom he met supplied him with food, and even shared with him their precious cigarettes.

Paul remained shy of the larger villages and towns. Sometimes he stopped at a farm-house or cottage and was given hot coffee fresh from the blue pot on the stove. He was a little nervous at first of his adopted lingo, and a pretended deafness helped him when he was posed. But these French folk accepted him, and were touchingly kind. He slept in their barns and sometimes in a bed, spending the evening sitting with the family round the kitchen stove, a rather silent and solemn man with many memories in his eyes.

A very gentle mood had fallen upon Brent. He was marching away from defeat, trudging step by step from his own past, that past that seemed so full of sordid yet pathetic futilities. He found his heart going out to children, dogs, and the poor old wrinkled women who had starved so bravely for four years. Often he shared his food with the cottagers, the bully beef and jam and biscuits he won upon the road.

A man who has tasted the full bitterness of failure looks eagerly, almost incredulously at the gleam in the sky that symbolizes a new hope. Brent felt that he was escaping from under a thundercloud, and that the edge of it was behind him. He had known that emptiness of the stomach, that sense of having fallen through himself into a mood of cynical apathy and tragic surrender, when a man wonders whether he shall end his life or struggle on, whether his dead self-respect is worth carrying upon his shoulders.

“That damned fool Brent! Had his chance and missed it.”

But Brent knew that his own incorrigible good nature had brought him to bankruptcy. He had trusted men, other men who had lived to make money, and he had been astonished when they had torn him asunder and used him both as a scapegoat and as a victim. His own wife had never forgiven him for the catastrophe. She, too, had been greedy. Brent knew that money was at the bottom of all the harlotry, the commercial treachery, and the fierce physical greed of a great part of modern life. He had found War far less savage and contemptible than the assassination of souls that a rich Peace encourages.

Other men had scrambled over his body, and, now that the war had set him on his feet again, he was possessed by a great yearning to begin life over again, to make some success of the years that were to come. He wanted to feel the grip of a new self-respect, the stiff back of a new manhood. He wanted to think that he mattered, that there was yet some measure of rich blood in him that could make some other creature happy. He was curiously humble over it, boyish and innocent. And yet as he foot-slogged it along those muddy winter roads, a pilgrim in search of his second chance, he became possessed by a vague yet spiritual conviction that he would find that chance somewhere in poor, battered, devastated France.

It was on the road from Avesnes to Maroilles that Brent met the girl with the black shawl. It was no more than an incident in his pilgrimage, but an incident that flushed him with the warm red wine of humanism.

He was sitting on the butt of a broken telegraph pole when the girl came along the road. She was pretty and dark and rather slender for a French peasant, and Brent was aware of her as an eager and hurrying figure with a black shawl folded over her shoulders, and the end of it held so as to cover her mouth. She came quickly towards him. Her eyes were big and bright with hope, the desperate hope that her man had come at last.

Brent saw her falter. Then the light died out of her eyes. Her face seemed to grow more sallow, and very sad. Yet she approached him, smiling with a sudden pity, a compassionate friendliness that warmed to all those lonely ones who returned.

“You are going home, monsieur?”

Brent raised his cloth cap.

“If I find a home.”

She sighed, dropped the shawl from her mouth, and sat down beside him. Brent felt that she had suffered very much; she looked ill, her soft eyes were growing old with watching.

“I thought you might be my Jean,” she said, with the simplicity of one who had lived in days of great sadness.

“I am sorry,” said Brent, “has he not come home yet?”

Her eyes looked far away. The fingers of her left hand pulled at a splinter that stood up from the round bulk of the pole.

“Four years. Yes, it is a long time. And our child died—died of starvation. For six months I have had no letter.”

“I am sorry,” said Brent.

She began to question him—for his presence there seemed to give her hope—and the lies that he had to tell her turned sour in Brent’s mouth.

“You have come a long way, monsieur, perhaps from the centre of Germany?”

“Yes, a long way. I was in Germany.”

“It may be that you met my Jean? Jean Bart is his name, a tall man with thoughtful blue eyes and a scar on his forehead.”

“I am afraid not, madame. But there must be hundreds of persons who have not yet come home.”

“You think so, monsieur?”

“Many are in hospital. Some were in Russia.”

She smiled bravely.

“Oh, I do not give up hope. Some day he will return. I pray to God each night and morning, when I work and when I eat.”

“Please God he will,” said Brent, and found that he had uttered a prayer.

The girl insisted on Paul going back to her home, a little red farm among poplars on the green slope of a hill above the windings of a river. Jean’s father and mother lived there, two quiet people to whom life had left but little to say. They were very kind to Paul, and he passed the night at the farm, sleeping in a feather bed in a narrow room whose window showed him the stars hanging in the bare branches of an old apple tree. There was the smell of home about the place, the home of the Frenchman who had not returned. Brent felt that the little house watched and listened with every window, its gables cocked like the ears of a dog waiting for its master.

Brent was touched by the kindness these poor people showed him. They sent him upon his way with a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some apples in his pockets, and a sense of the essential goodness of the humbler folk who suffer. The girl went with him to the gate opening upon the road.

“Bon voyage.”

Her soft eyes and her sadness put new life into Brent.

“May he return—very soon,” he said; “your husband; perhaps I have brought you good luck.”

She watched Brent march off down the road, and his going made her yearn all the more deeply for the other man who had not returned.

“Four years,” he said, “four years of his youth—and of mine.”

Yet Brent’s words might have been prophetic, for Jean Bart came home that night.

Brent tramped on through Landrecies and Le Cateau, those tragic towns, half alive, half dead. It was when he came to the village of Maretz, lying all red and quiet under a flat grey sky, that Brent felt the new phase of his adventure, even as a man feels the nearness of the sea. He was on the edge of the wilderness, fifty rolling miles of grey-green desolation upon which a few broken villages floated like derelicts. Brent spent three days in Maretz, living with an old French couple in their cottage on the road to Serain, very busy as a forager and a collector of hard rations. He had the wilderness before him, a wilderness where he could count on neither water nor food. But Brent left Maretz rather suddenly. He was watching a party of German prisoners working at the red mountain of rubbish that had been the church when he became aware of a man in khaki standing a little to one side and staring at him intently.

Brent knew the man, a corporal who had served in the same battalion. He braced himself to the crisis, gave the man stare for stare, a blank look of curiosity, said something in French, and strolled on. Brent did not turn his head to see whether the corporal was still interested and suspicious, but he went straight to the cottage on the road to Serain, collected his bag and stick, and footed it out of Maretz.

That night he slept in a half-ruined cottage at Beaurevoir. The morning brought him luck, and a ride on a lorry that was travelling to Roisel, and at Roisel he won a hot dinner at the cook-house of a Labour Company. Things were going well. The lift on the lorry had saved him many miles of tramping and much food. That evening he reached Peronne, and saw the brown and battered town outlined against a February sunset, and all the blue waters of its valley full of the reflection of flushed clouds and gouts of gold. Brent found a corner in Peronne, a snuggish corner, even though the stars looked down on him, and it was in Peronne that he had his vision.

It was a strangely vivid affair, a dream and yet perhaps more than a dream. Brent found himself in Beaucourt, standing in the garden of the Café de la Victoire and looking at a resurrected Tom Beckett, a Beckett who sat on the heap of stones that he—Brent—had thrown over the burial-place of Manon Latour’s treasure. Beckett’s boots were muddy, so were his clothes, and his hair was full of blood and earth. Yet the face of Beckett was like white light. He sat and talked with the intensity of a man who was fiercely concerned in making his meaning clear, yet Brent could not understand a word of all that his dear friend said. He was conscious of effort, bafflement, suspense. He kept noticing the gap in the upper row of Beckett’s teeth, a gap that had always made Brent think of a hole in a white fence. He was astonished by the discovery that he could see Beckett’s heart beating under his soiled tunic, and see it as a reddish light that waxed and waned with each beat, a mysterious and palpitating piece of glowing human flesh. And all the while, Brent was trying to grasp what his dead friend said, for he was speaking to him, as though he, Brent, the live man, were in desperate need of some human message.

“Sweat,—sweat!”

That was the one crude, forcible and enigmatic word that Brent remembered. Then Beckett smiled at him, and vanished off the pile of stones like a puff of smoke dispersed by the wind. Brent woke up and stared at the stars. He was shivering.

“Beaucourt,” he said like a child repeating a lesson; “I have got to go to Beaucourt.”